LUX UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPENINGS 21 April - 27 April 2008

[luxweekly at lux.org.uk]

UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPENINGS IN LONDON



1. Monday 21st- 27th April. 1,2,3? Avant-Gardes: Film/Art between  
Experiment and Archive. Tate Modern, London

2. Tuesday 22nd April. Press screening:  Hotel Diaries ? John Smith.  
Birkbeck Cinema, London

3. Tuesday 22nd April. ?Not The Girl Who Misses Much?: Female  
Filmmakers Around 1980. Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, London

4. Wednesday 23rd April. La Décision Doypak, Paul Rooney. Matt's  
Gallery, London

5. Friday 25th April. Heralded as the New Black, Ryan Gander. South  
London Gallery, London

6. Friday 25th April. Juventude em marcha (Colossal Youth) - A Film by  
Pedro Costa. The director will be in conversation with Simon Field  
before tonight's screening. Ciné lumière, London

7. Sunday 27th April. The Scolt Head screenings : Series 3 Programme.  
The Scolt Head, London




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1.
Monday 21st-27th April.
1,2,3? Avant-Gardes: Film/Art between Experiment and Archive.
Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended. For tickets book online or  
call 020 7887 8888. www.tate.org.uk/modern

1,2,3? Avant-Gardes Film, Art between Experiment and Archive explores  
and challenges the ?continuous? history of experimentation in film and  
art and the interaction between both fields. It also seeks a possible  
history for Polish avant-garde art and film, to be discovered and  
reconstructed against many distortions in Polish history over the last  
80 years.

The project points to different ideas of modernism by examining  
parallel practices of conceptual film and art production generated  
from the Cold War era through today. Grounded in the extensive output  
of experimental film in Poland during the 1970s, 1,2,3? Avant-Gardes  
Film, Art between Experiment and Archive offers a selection of films  
produced primarily by Polish artists from that period, in addition to  
contemporary work that challenges established histories of  
experimental cinema. The series will include three programmes:  
Analytical Strategies, Games and Participation, and Consumption.

Curated by ?ukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang
Part of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, supported by Polish  
Cultural Institute. www.kinoteka.org.uk

Monday 21 April 2008  6.30pm	: Analytical Strategies
Wednesday 23 April 2008  6.30pm : Consumption
Sunday 27 April 2008 5pm	: Games and Participation




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2.
Tuesday 22nd April, 10.00 a.m.
Press screening:  Hotel Diaries ? John Smith
Birkbeck Cinema, 41 Gordon Square, London, WC1
Admission free but booking is essential. RSVP to Madeleine Probst by  
Monday April 21st.  Email: maddy at watershed.co.uk  Tel: 0117 9275120

Hotel Diaries ? John Smith, 2001-7, video, 82 mins.
Made in hotel rooms across the world over a period of six years, this  
recently completed series of video works relates personal experiences  
and reflections to the current conflicts in the Middle East. Playing  
upon chance and coincidence, the hotel room is employed as a 'found'  
film set, where the architecture, furnishing and decoration become the  
means by which the filmmaker?s small adventures are linked to major  
world events.

"?These deceptively unassuming works consist of single takes from the  
point of view of Smith's camcorder as he explores the nocturnal spaces  
of hotels he is staying in and delivers monologues on his thoughts and  
observations. At once politically concerned and very funny, these  
brilliantly structured ramblings connect the observations of his  
surroundings with the horror of world events in consistently  
surprising ways."  Maximilian Le Cain, Film Ireland Magazine.




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3.
Tuesday 22nd April. 7pm
?Not The Girl Who Misses Much?: Female Filmmakers Around 1980.
Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, 7A Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EJ
If you would like to book a seat call Nina Øverli on 020 7408 1613 or  
email no at spruethmagers.com.

This film screening celebrates the art of the German artist Astrid  
Klein, currently on view at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London. The  
choice of films has been inspired by the aesthetic form of Klein?s  
collages and their subject matter: the representation of the female  
body in mainstream culture. This screening
presents the rare opportunity to see work by key female filmmakers,  
from Nouvelle Vague-inspired cinema (Akerman) and the films of the  
London Filmmakers? Coop (Matthee, Keane), to the Super 8 movement of  
the 1980s (Maye/Rendschmidt) and contemporary video art (Rist).

The film curator Maxa Zoller will give a brief introduction to the  
programme. We are pleased to announce that Jean Mathee and Tina Keane  
will be available for a Q&A session after the screening.

Chantal Akerman, Saute ma Ville, 1968, 11min, DVD
Jean Matthee, The Descent of the Seductress, 1983, 11min, DVD
Tina Keane, Faded Wallpaper, 1988, 18min, DVD
Ingrid Maye/Volker Rendschmidt, Ohne Liebe gibt es keinen Tod, 1980, 5min, DVD
Pipilotti Rist, I am not the girl who misses much, 1986, 7:45min, DVD




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4.
Wednesday 23rd April.
La Décision Doypak, Paul Rooney.
Matt's Gallery, 42-44 Copperfield Rd, E3 4RR www.mattsgallery.org
Exhibition: Apr 23 - Jun 15, 2008. Gallery open Wed-Sun 12-6
There will be timed screenings of La Décision Doypack on the hour and  
at half past the hour, from midday until 6pm, Wednesday to Sunday. No  
booking required.

For his first exhibition at Matt?s Gallery, and first solo exhibition  
in London, Paul Rooney has made a new 27 minute film shot on 16mm, La  
Décision Doypack (2008), co-commissioned by Matt?s Gallery and the  
Loughborough University Radar programme. A further new commission  
entitled Failing That (2008), with images and a text written by the  
artist, will feature in the gallery publication, which is free to  
visitors throughout the exhibition.

These works approach the subject of historical memory. Exploring the  
way in which history only properly exists if it is actively recalled  
in the present, but also how flawed that recollection can be, the  
works ultimately reveal the comedy and melancholy involved in  
attempting to represent the past in art.

Both works take politically charged historical moments as starting  
points and involve real events in their fictional construction. La  
Décision Doypack is inspired by a real web memoir by retired  
Australian food-packaging company manager Mackenzie J Gregory, who  
remembers walking the night-time streets of Paris during the events of  
May 1968. Failing That uses a moment from an actual documentary about  
Chile from the mid-eighties, in which an adolescent boy gives a public  
speech after the death of his father Manuel Guerrero, who had been  
killed by the military junta.

It is partly because of this connection with real life and real  
events, events that involve revolutionary turmoil or profound  
injustice, that the imaginative confabulation and formal artifice of  
the works themselves is thrown into relief, underlining the pathos and  
absurdity of our attempts to do justice to the past.




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5.
Friday 25th April. Heralded as the New Black, Ryan Gander.
Ryan Gander : Heralded as the New Black
South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Rd, SE5 8UH www.southlondongallery.org
Exhibition: April 25 - June 22 2008. Gallery open Tue-Sun 12-6

This solo exhibition by acclaimed artist Ryan Gander comprises a new  
body of work made during a ?year off? from exhibiting and includes a  
number of works made exclusively for the SLG space. Organised in  
partnership with Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, the exhibition consists of  
entirely new installations, interventions, films and by-products which  
derive meaning from their location and context. The exhibition is a  
diverse and playful investigation into facets of the making,  
presentation, history and documentation of art and design.

Gander harnesses art's potential to communicate and creates work in  
various written, spoken and visual languages. His practice adopts both  
familiar styles, such as cartoons and maps, as well as more  
avant-garde aesthetics. By appropriating existing art and design work  
to generate new pieces, Gander creates fictional histories, traced  
from real historical moments and turning points in visual culture. As  
such the exhibition thematically investigates notions of copyright,  
intellectual property and the issues surrounding ideas of  
documentation and collaboration, originality and meaning.

A local street map, available for visitors to take away, has been  
altered to include streets that existed before 1914, bringing the  
structure of civic space into question. Another work, The New New  
Alphabet (2008), is an installation of thirty-six wooden printers?  
blocks made in response to the utopian ?new alphabet? typeface  
designed by Wim Crouwel in 1967. The new alphabet was radical in its  
use of only vertical and horizontal strokes making certain letters  
unrecognisable. Gander?s version is a series of additional marks  
rendering Crouwel?s alphabet legible again. The two typefaces work in  
symbiosis so that Gander?s typeface, presented out of context in a  
pile on the gallery floor, proves to be as illegible as the original.

A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my  
table and fell to the floor (2008) is an installation of one hundred  
15cm crystal balls, each laser-etched inside with a suspended image of  
a sheet of paper. Elsewhere in the gallery a related sequence of  
photographic studies show paper falling in the studio environment akin  
to Muybridge?s investigations into movement. Ripe with potential, the  
work alludes to the ?what if? of the creative process, the fugitive  
nature of thought and inspiration.

Humour underpins much of Gander?s work, rescuing it from mere  
'institutional critique', engaging us with its dead-pan,  
self-deprecating knowingness. It is as rigorous as it is strangely,  
accessible. A catalogue, the first to articulate a critical in-depth  
examination of his practice accompanies the exhibition.




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6.
Friday 25th April. 7pm
Juventude em marcha (Colossal Youth) - A Film by Pedro Costa.
Ciné lumière, 17 Queensberry Place, London SW7 2DT
Tickets £7, conc. £5 Tel 020 7073 1333. On exclusive London release at  
Ciné lumière: 25 ? 30 April 2008

Director Pedro Costa will be in conversation with Simon Field at  
7.00pm on 25 April ahead of the 8.30pm screening of his film.
Juventude em marcha (Colossal Youth) Portugal / France / Switzerland,  
2006, 155 mins, col

Beautifully photographed, elliptical, sometimes confounding, often  
mysterious and wholly beguiling: Pedro Costa's latest film was one of  
the most fascinating competition entries at the 2006 Cannes Film  
Festival. Set in Lisbon's dilapidated Cape Verdean ghetto as it  
undergoes urban renewal, its episodic narrative, developed by the  
director with his non-professional cast and shot in digital video,  
unfolds as a series of seemingly disconnected encounters. Ventura, a  
retired immigrant labourer recently abandoned by his wife, moves  
through rooms and streets visiting assorted Lisbon dwellers (a  
recovering drug addict, a beggar, a museum guard, and a mystical idler  
who is the last holdout in the crumbling slum) as he negotiates with  
the authorities over his impending move to a modern, antiseptic new  
apartment. Prioritising rhythm and texture over plot, this is a film  
that resists easy consumption, but while demanding, it is also  
intensely rewarding.




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7.
Sunday 27th April. 7pm
The Scolt Head screenings : Series 3 Programme.
The Scolt Head, 107a Culford Road, London N1 4HT
Screenings are free. Seats are allocated on a first come, first served basis.

The Scolt Head screenings invite artists to present a selection of  
their works on film or video alongside a feature film of their choice,  
irrespective of its influence on their practice.These Sunday evening  
screenings at The SCOLT HEAD aim to encourage an open dialogue about  
artists? works on film and video.

27 April ? Lisa Byrne presents ?Taxi I Partyin? (2007),?Taxi II New  
Years Day 5am? (2007), ?Taxi III Stand up and Cry like a Man? (2007)  
with ?Lonely are the Brave? (1962,David Miller)